"We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness." Using these words that are so close to
enunciating a principle of the natural law, the thirteen united States of
America recognized that all men are created equal and declared independence
from England.

THE NATURAL LAW

The natural law is the law written in
our hearts and our souls, our very being, by God. Romans 2:14-15. The natural
law, says St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa
Theologica, is "nothing else than the rational creature's
participation in the eternal law." It is called natural law, says John
Hardon, S.J. in his Modern
Catholic Dictionary, because all are "subject to it from
birth," because it is only those "duties … derivable from human
nature itself," and because "its essentials can be grasped by the
unaided light of human reason."

Father Hardon points out that,
"while the object of natural law is the whole moral order as knowable by
human reason," some obligations of that law are more difficult to realize
than others. "Primary precepts are most easily perceived, as for example,
that good must be done and evil must be avoided. Secondary precepts are also
available to most people, such as the prescriptions of the Decalogue."
Reason can also attain "more refined conclusions" from those
precepts, but "with varying degrees of difficulty, such as the evil of
contraception or the fact that direct abortion is always forbidden."

Though the word slavery was not used
in the Constitution of the United States, slavery's continued existence
reflected the contradiction and compromise inherent in the founding of this
country. The positive law, the Constitution enacted by men, did not reflect the
natural law to which the Declaration of Independence had appealed. The Civil
War did not resolve that contradiction. Nor did the constitutional amendments
adopted in its wake. They eliminated slavery based on the color of a person's
skin, but America adopted the legal fiction of separate but equal that treated
a man as a second-class citizen based on the color of his skin. That fiction
was abandoned almost a century later though not without anomalies and resistance
that linger today.

As our positive law came closer to
the natural law in the 1950s and 1960s by recognizing the equality of men
before the law despite the different colors of their skin, it moved away from
it in the area of human sexuality and procreation.

It may seem paradoxical that positive
law would approach the natural law on some issues while retreating from it on
others. To understand how this could occur, let's look at George P. Fletcher's Our
Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy, which
the American Association of Publishers selected as the best book published on
law in 2001.

Professor Fletcher, the Cardozo
Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University School of Law, is a Jew who
rejects the natural law approach. In Our Secret Constitution, he argues
that the American legal system should instead reflect Talmudic thought by which
a lawgiver's intent is irrelevant, whether the lawgiver be God or the framers
of the Constitution.

I never cease to be amazed that legal scholars,
particularly in the United States, continue to be confused about the relevance
of the framers' original intent. Secular legal systems could not possibly be
more demanding, more deferential to authority, than religious cultures that
believe that their binding legal principles were declared by God. Yet, a story
from the Talmud beautifully illustrates the folly of invoking original intent
in a dispute about the meaning of God's commandments. A group of rabbis were
engaged in a debate about whether a particular earthenware oven was kosher or
not. One of them, Rabbi Eliezer, said no; the other rabbis said yes. Rabbi
Eliezer proceeded to invoke a variety of fantastic signs to support his view:
at his command, a carob tree was uprooted and flew across the field, a stream
flowed upstream, and the walls started to collapse before they were halted. The
rabbis were not impressed by these signs. Then Rabbi Eliezer, desperate and
alone, invoked the argument of original intent: "If I am right, let heaven
be the proof." A heavenly voice then proclaimed: "How dare you oppose
Rabbi Eliezer, whose views are everywhere the law." Rabbi Joshua arose and
quoted Deuteronomy: "It is not in Heaven." Rabbi Jeremiah explained
the reference: Ever since the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, "we pay no
attention to heavenly voices, for God already wrote in the Torah at Mount
Sinai." The point is that once the language is released and given to
jurists to fashion to the needs of their time, the task of lawgivers is
finished. Their intentions and desires cannot rule — either from the grave or
from heaven.

Professor Fletcher adds,

The story concludes, in one version,
with an encounter between Rabbi Nathan and the prophet Elijah. Rabbi Nathan
asked, "What did God do at that moment when Rabbi Joshua proclaimed 'it is
not in Heaven'?" Elijah answered, "God laughed and said: 'My children
have defeated me, my children have defeated me.'"

What stands in the way of man's
ignoring the will of God as Fletcher's Talmudic analysis advocates? Fletcher
answers pointedly: "Pope Pio Nono (Pius IX) retreated within the walls of
the Vatican and in 1870 his council declared the infallibility of his office on
matters of faith and morals. This declaration that we can know absolute truth
became a model for all the ideological extremists who followed on the right and
on the left."

For Fletcher, the declaration of
papal infallibility is the underlying problem because it assumes there is a
natural law, a Truth that we can know, and proclaims the pope can expound it.
This, Fletcher says, is the model for all ideological extremists. So, papal
infallibility is the model for the Soviets, the Nazis, Mao, the SDS, the
Weathermen, Neo-Nazis, Islamic extremists, White Supremacists, and Black
Panthers, etc.?

Where does Fletcher believe we should
look, if not to natural law and the will of God? "The truth lies in what
works, in the validation of experiences, not in the abstract requirements of
ideological logic," says Fletcher. "The pragmatic legal mind rushes
to reject moral extremes in favor of some vague standard of what is good for
everybody, all things considered."

Truth "lies in what works."
This is the American virtue: pragmatism; whatever works is good and true. It is
the rejection of natural law, the rejection of morality, and the rejection of
Truth. It is ingrained in the American legal and political systems.

"The pragmatist tells a man to
think what he must think and never mind the Absolute," notes G.K.
Chesterton in Orthodoxy.
"But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. This
philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of
human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a
pragmatist."

Pragmatists denigrate the natural law
approach but nevertheless often appeal to a "higher" law, whether
equality, feminism, gay rights, or some other "right," when
bludgeoning those who respect the natural law. Pure pragmatism encourages any
stratagem in the service of making an ideology succeed. The ideology justifies
the means. A pragmatism that refuses to acknowledge the natural law results in
laws that sometimes conform to the natural law, such as laws against murder and
rape, and that sometimes don't, such as our laws on abortion.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
505 U.S. 833 (1992) the Supreme Court explained its contraception and abortion
decisions thus: "these matters, involving the most intimate and personal
choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity
and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth
Amendment." And then: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define
one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery
of human life." The Court trotted out the passage again in 2003 in Lawrence
v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, to rationalize constitutional protection for anal
sodomy between men.

MYSTERY OF LIFE PASSAGE

The mystery of life passage reflects
post-modernist thought: We create our own reality. It's gibberish: a fig leaf
that hides and tries to make more palatable the Court's Nietzschean imposition
of its will on the less powerful. The Justices were pragmatic: they wanted to
legalize abortion and homosexual sodomy, so they did what it took.

Not all people are as articulate or
as open as Fletcher about the danger that the Pope, the Church, the natural
law, and, indeed, Truth, represent to them. But some are even blunter.

In Aborting
America (1979), Bernard Nathanson details the successful efforts of
Lawrence Lader and himself, two Jews from New York City, to legalize abortion
in New York in the late 1960s. To do so, they chose the Catholic bishops as
their foe. Lader insisted that to get abortion legal, "we've got to bring
the Catholic hierarchy out where we can fight them. That's the real enemy.
The biggest single obstacle to peace and decency throughout all of
history." Lader's comment was not a casual observation, but a conscious,
bitter approach. "He held forth on that theme for most of the drive
home," recounts Nathanson. "It was a comprehensive and chilling
indictment of the poisonous influence of Catholicism in secular affairs from
its inception until the day before yesterday. I was far from an admirer of the
church's role in the world chronicle, but his insistent, uncompromising recitation
brought to mind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It passed through my mind
that if one had substituted 'Jewish' for 'Catholic', it would have been the
most vicious anti-Semitic tirade imaginable."

Lader's approach required dividing
the Catholic bishops from their flock. "[E]very revolution has to have its
villain," said Lader. "Now, in our case, it makes little sense to
lead a campaign against unjust laws, even though that's what we really are
doing. We have to narrow the focus, identify those unjust laws with a person or
a group of people." Who? "Not just all Catholics. First of all,
that's too large a group, and for us to vilify them all would diffuse our
focus. Secondly, we have to convince liberal Catholics to join us, a popular
front as it were, and if we tar them all with the same brush, we'll just
antagonize a few who might otherwise have joined us and be valuable show pieces
for us. No, it's got to be the Catholic hierarchy."

Lader's tactic was outrageous, but
Catholics were not blameless either. They were complicit by undercutting Church
teaching on contraception and abortion. For example, Doctor John Rock, a
Catholic who taught at Harvard Medical School, was one of the leading clinical
researchers who developed the pill. And, in From Patriotism to Pluralism:
How Catholics Initiated the Repeal of Birth Control Restrictions in
Massachusetts, excerpted
and adapted in Boston College Magazine, Seth Meehan documents that Richard
Cardinal Cushing of Boston facilitated the repeal of Massachusetts's ban on
contraceptives in the mid-1960s. When the Massachusetts legislature voted to
end the ban on contraceptives, it did so with the approval and assistance of
the Boston Archdiocese in concert with the Planned Parenthood League of
Massachusetts. In contrast, Catholic teaching insists a government should guard
morality by protecting the family against contraceptives because they are
contrary to the natural law. Humanae
Vitae, 23 (1968) appeals to Public Authorities: "do not tolerate
any legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are
opposed to the natural law of God."

JULY 1964

In July 1964, about nine months after
the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Fr. Robert Drinan, Fr. Richard McCormick,
Fr. Charles Curran, Fr. Giles Milhaven, other Catholic theologians, and at
least one bishop went to the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport to meet with Ted
and Bobby Kennedy to discuss the position a Catholic politician should take on
abortion.

Let's listen to Giles Milhaven, a
Jesuit who later left the priesthood and taught at Brown University, describe
it at a 1984 meeting of Catholics for a Free Choice:

I remember vividly. Other theologians and I were
driving down Route 3 to Cape Cod, with Bob Drinan at the wheel. We were to meet
with the Senators Kennedy and the Shrivers at their request. I remember it
vividly because the traffic lanes were jammed and halted, presumably because of
an accident ahead, and Bob Drinan drove 60 miles an hour down the breakdown
lane. Despite my misgivings each time we swept around a curve, we theologians
arrived safely at the Kennedy compound.

We can hardly claim legalized
abortion was foisted on an unsuspecting Catholic Church when prominent clergy
were working surreptitiously to facilitate the change years before Lader and
Nathanson undercut New York's laws and a decade before Roe v. Wade.
Moreover, Justice Brennan, the only Catholic on the Supreme Court when it
decided Roe v. Wade, was stridently pro-abortion, lobbying the
pro-abortion position to the other Justices.

Once, when there was unrest and
rioting on a Pacific island, I asked its former bishop, an American missionary,
why the Church seemed so weak there. His answer? We do a poor job of
evangelization.

The same is true in the United
States. We often do not propound the truth that is Catholicism. We keep its
light under a bushel basket. We conform ourselves to the American Way. For
example, in our bishops' public battle with the Obama Administration over its
mandate that health insurance policies cover contraception, the bishops' chosen
battleground is the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom. They want
to fight the battle on American principles rather than on Church teaching. The
beauty and truth of the Church's teaching on human sexuality, marriage,
contraception, and large families is treated as incidental to the battle, where
it is considered at all. The binding nature of natural law on all, not just
Catholics, is all but ignored. The Church in America seems to treat Church
teaching on contraception as an embarrassment, an atavistic holdover from
medieval times.

"We have gotten gun-shy,"
Cardinal Timothy Dolan told
the Wall Street Journal, "in speaking with any amount of cogency on
chastity and sexual morality." He dated this diffidence to "the mid-
and late '60s, when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics
in general got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council taught,
first and foremost, is that we should be chums with the world, and that the
best thing the church can do is become more and more like everybody else."

The "flash point," the New
York archbishop said, was Humanae Vitae, which "brought such a
tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the church, that I think most of
us — and I'm using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself —
kind of subconsciously said, 'Whoa. We'd better never talk about that, because
it's just too hot to handle.' We forfeited the chance to be a coherent moral
voice when it comes to one of the more burning issues of the day."

The Church in America seems gun-shy
on many issues: the usurious economy, American militarism, gluttony,
pornography, etc. Of what worth is a civil law guarantee of free speech or of
freedom of religion if Catholics — or their bishops — decide we better not talk
about hot issues? The Church often seems more intent on conforming to American
mores rather than transforming them. It is disconcerting to hear the Church
criticize an order that it pay for contraceptives while remaining silent on the
evil of using them.

"Doesn't the church have a
problem conveying its moral principles to its own flock?" asked the Wall
Street Journal. "Do we ever!" replied Cardinal Dolan "with a
hearty laugh." I suspect it was a nervous laugh, given the possibility
that the bishops' silence may make the hereafter "too hot to handle"
for them.

The Obama Administration, not the
Church, wants the battleground to be contraception — the so-called war against
women. Downplaying moral principles, the bishops insist the battle is "not
about access to contraception," nor about "'banning contraception,'
when the U.S. Supreme Court took that issue off the table two generations
ago." United
for Religious Freedom, A Statement of the Administrative Committee of the
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, March 14, 2012.

Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins
used a similar but more obsequious tack
to explain the university's lawsuit against the Obama Administration over
the mandate:

Let me say very clearly what this lawsuit is not
about: it is not about preventing women from having access to contraception,
nor even about preventing the Government from providing such services. Many of
our faculty, staff and students — both Catholic and non-Catholic — have made
conscientious decisions to use contraceptives. As we assert the right to follow
our conscience, we respect their right to follow theirs. And we believe that,
if the Government wishes to provide such services, means are available that do
not compel religious organizations to serve as its agents.

So the Church in America focuses not
on morality but on lobbying and coalition building and lawsuits. But the Obama
Administration wants to focus on contraception. Why? Because, like Archbishop
Dolan, it knows Catholics are poorly catechized? Because it thinks Catholics
like Father Jenkins don't care whether people form their consciences properly
or engage in sinful activity? Because, like Lader and Nathanson, it wants to
drive a wedge between the laity and the bishops — even if that wedge is
illusory as the bishops themselves have no coherent moral voice?

SCRIBBLING

Scribbling
for the New York Times, Gary Gutting, a Catholic who teaches
philosophy at Notre Dame, asserted that a chasm exists between the laity and
the episcopacy, to the extreme of asserting that, despite contrary suggestions
from the bishops, the Church no longer teaches that contraception is sinful:

In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious
authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there
is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves
the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as
authorized by God. They may be wrong, but their judgment is answerable to no
one but God. In this sense, even the Catholic Church is a democracy.

But, even so, haven't the members of the Catholic
Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine
the teachings of the Church? By no means. … Most Catholics … now reserve the
right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in
their own way the doctrines that they do accept. This is above all true in
matters of sexual morality, especially birth control, where the majority of
Catholics have concluded that the teachings of the bishops do not apply to
them. …

The mistake of the Obama administration — and of
almost everyone debating its decision — was to accept the bishops' claim that
their position on birth control expresses an authoritative "teaching of
the church." … The bishops' claim to authority in this matter has been
undermined because Catholics have decisively rejected it. The immorality of
birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI
meant his 1968 encyclical, "Humanae Vitae," to settle the issue in
the manner of the famous tag, "Roma locuta est, causa finita est." In
fact the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.

In a democratic society, the teaching
of the Catholic Church is subject to majority vote, which also determines
morality? In a democracy, anything is morally justified if the majority
approves? Genocide? Anti-Semitism? Usury? Rape? Just wave the wand of public
approval and the Seven Deadly Sins become the Seven Divine Virtues?
Analogously, the teaching of the Church and the morality of an action are
determined by the dictator in authoritarian countries, or by the Communist
Party?

Professor Gutting's approach is silly.
All he has noticed, really, is that Catholics are sinners and that
contraception is a widespread sin. But his approach passes for philosophy at
Notre Dame and perhaps reflects a prevailing but incoherent belief of Catholics
in America.

Can the state properly infringe upon
religion? Of course it can. Does the First Amendment prevent all infringement
on religion? Of course not. Can the state, for example, make polygamy criminal
even though Mormons believe it a religious duty? The Supreme Court upheld a federal
law outlawing polygamy in federal territories in Reynolds v. United States,
98 U.S. 145 (1878) (though I'd hesitate to predict how it would decide a
similar case today), saying: "Suppose one believed that human sacrifices
were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended
that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a
sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself
upon the funeral pile of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the
civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?"

So why can't federal law make a
religious institution's failure to provide insurance coverage for contraception
or abortion punishable by fine?

NOT AN UNLIMITED RIGHT

The Catholic Church teaches that
religious freedom "is not of itself an unlimited right;" just limits
on its exercise must be politically prudent, accord with the common good, and
be ratified through legal norms "consistent with the objective moral order."
Compendium
of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 422. The Church thus insists that
restrictions must conform to the objective moral order; they must conform to
the natural law. In contrast, today's American legal and political system in
practice denies the existence of an objective moral order. In the American
system, conformity of the positive law to the natural law now occurs
haphazardly, by happenstance. A mandate that a religious institution — or,
indeed, any institution — must provide insurance coverage for contraception or
abortion does not conform to the objective moral order, while a ban on Mormon
or Moslem polygamy or a ban on Hindu suttee does.

Political authority "must be
guided by the moral law [and] exercised within the context of the moral
order." Id., 396. As long as Catholics are exercising political
rights within a system that often disregards the moral order and natural law,
favorable and proper results will be sporadic. That does not mean Catholics
should not assert civic rights or be active in the political process: Saint
Paul asserted his rights as a Roman citizen. Indeed, we should strive to bring
positive law into congruence with the natural law. But we must not exalt our
civic rights or the political process such that they become or seem more important
than the Faith, the natural law, or Truth.

Lawrence Lader remained bitterly
anti-Catholic all his life, even suing the Internal Revenue Service
unsuccessfully to revoke the Church's tax exemptions. In contrast, Bernard
Nathanson, who presided over 60,000 abortions, including performing one that
killed his own child, repented and converted to Catholicism.

Our solution must be first and
foremost Catholic. As individuals and as a Church, we must root out sin in our
lives and cultivate virtue. We must convert America, not bludgeon her into
political submission. When America's heart changes, so will its appreciation of
natural law, the Church, and the role of the pope. So, catechize Catholics —
laity and clergy alike. Pray for your enemies, and evangelize. Go forth, tell
the nation the Good News.

The K of C prides itself on
its prolife stance and prolife activities, and Knights are supposed to be
"practical" Catholics. Nevertheless, the K of C includes men who are
publicly and adamantly proabortion or prochoice. Errant Knight: The Scandal
of Prochoice Knights, an e-book by James G. Bruen, Jr., details the efforts of a group of individual
Knights to sanction a brother Knight who was a publicly prochoice politician.
It describes the personalities, pleadings, and internal K of C practices and
procedures that led to a sentence of indefinite suspension of the Knight after
a trial committee found him guilty of giving scandal, as well as the aftermath
of his conviction. Must reading for Knights and for all interested in the K of
C. Give a copy of this short book to every Knight you know. $2.99. Read
More/Buy